Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Who determines reliable journalism? I'm liberal but CNN's had issued a massive amount of retractions for their Russia stories, still has the fake fish feeding article up, the Guardian had to retract their 'unarmed' front page story about the drug dealer with the gun in his car. Making shit up is commonplace, yet media censors inevitably only want to target Breitbart and right sources. It's a plain as day transparent power grab by the hard left.

View on HN

Journalists are just people. Reliable journalism occurs when those people try their best to provide accurate information, and when they make a mistake they correct it. That's it. You can't expect perfection from people.

> when those people try their best to provide accurate information

It is not enough to trust them to do their best. Journalists should be in a structure that strongly incentivizes telling the truth and strongly punishes false information. It is very unclear that US media outlets, almost all of which are highly politicized, have this property.

> Journalists should be in a structure that strongly incentivizes telling the truth and strongly punishes false information. It is very unclear that US media outlets, almost all of which are highly politicized, have this property.

Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#Killian_documents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Iraq_War_helico...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_M._Thompson#Reporting_sca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Logan#Benghazi_report_apo...

https://www.timeout.com/chicago/tv/how-a-horrible-decision-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Finkel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass#The_New_Republic

I don't think anyone is looking for perfection, simply not creating a narrative one knows to be false.

The CNN fish feeding story was deliberately created by zooming film at the point the Japanese leader dumped their fish food, then zooming out again to show Trump dumping his, then writing text to support the fake narrative.

The Mark Duggan 'unarmed' headline was immediately followed by a story which revealed the suspect was armed.

The retracted CNN Russia stuff might have simply have been gross incompetence though so your point does apply there.

The Guardian isn't perfect, but you can't seriously compare it to Breitbart, which intentionally distorts facts on a regular basis, and goes out of it's way to sensationalize and offend.

Would the guardian be caught dead printing these? https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/breitbart-news-...

Or have they peddled lies as big as these ones? https://www.snopes.com/climatology-fraud-global-warming/ https://www.snopes.com/immigrants-california-wildfires/ https://www.snopes.com/planned-parenthood-satanists/

Look, maybe the media has a left bias. And it's plausible that right-leaning sources face more skepticism. That's not fair. But the reason Breitbart gets flack is because they really are that terrible.

Well yes, the cited Mark Duggan example is pretty damning, but there's Olivia Solon'a recent White Helmet article (which simply presents other secondary sources as if it was primary evidence) and the bizarre 'no such thing as false rape allegations' editorial, which as we've seen is false twice in merely the last two weeks.

That's an existing problem, and not an easy one to solve. It will have to rely on independent review.

But relying on social networks for news drops both careful research AND independent review, which is a step backward, not forward.

I really love VICE news on HBO even though it definitely comes from the Hard Left perspective. Basically all news should be taken skeptically, but as much as possible they just go with first person video interviews of the people involved.

I don't trust what CNN says about Steve Bannon or Roy Moore, but just hearing what they say about themselves in their own words is enough for me to know I don't belong in their camp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com